With a cry of shame she rolled over, concealing her naked breasts.
Cursing savagely, Reever bent down and pulled her T-shirt into place, covering the sensual temptation of her smooth young skin.
“You have enough money for that bus ticket yet?” he asked, his voice harsh.
She shook her head, refusing to look at him.
“You better get it, little girl. You better get it fast. I want you like hell on fire. And that’s all it will ever be. Want.”
He mounted his horse and looked down at Tory still lying curled around herself in a nest of grass and wildflowers. He closed his eyes and his hand clenched into a hard fist around the reins.
“Get up,” he said quietly. “It’s time to go home.”
Again she shook her head.
“Tory, don’t make me touch you.”
Slowly she sat up and looked at him.
When he saw her eyes, his breath came in with a swift, harsh sound.
“I know the way back,” she said, looking through him like he wasn’t there at all. Her voice was like her eyes, dark, wounded.
“I can’t let you ride alone.”
“I’ll walk.”
“It’s two miles.”
Her lips curved in a travesty of a smile. “Walking is one thing even clumsy city girls can do, remember?”
His breath came in with a harsh sound as he looked at the soft, honey-colored silk of Tory’s hair lifting in the breeze above the vulnerable curve of her neck.
“Be back by dinner,” he said roughly. “Don’t make me come after you. We’ll both regret it.” He turned Blackjack, then looked back and said, “And stay away from Jed unless you want another lesson. You’re too damned hungry to be so innocent. You’d get Jed so hot so fast that he’d hurt you and never even mean to.”
“And you’re different, right? You’re cold so you hurt me—and you mean every bit of it.” She shuddered with shame at the memory of how she must have looked when she pulled up her T-shirt and clumsily offered herself to Reever. “Go away,” she said hoarsely, shaking. “Oh, God, please, go away.”
“Tory—”
His voice was as raw as hers, but she didn’t hear it. She wasn’t even looking at him anymore. She had made him vanish in the only way left to her. She hugged her legs to her chest until she could rest her forehead on her knees, closing out the world, closing out him.
She didn’t move or open her eyes, even after the sound of shod hooves faded into silence.
6
Awkwardly Tory moved around the kitchen, trying to favor her right knee without being obvious about it. If Reever saw her limping he would just tear another strip off her for being a clumsy city girl. She couldn’t take that right now. She was still too raw from the afternoon. She didn’t know what she would do if he turned on her again.
She didn’t want to know.
Just as she didn’t want to remember the wild magic of his kiss, his touch, the look of raw longing she had caught on his face more than once. She knew he wanted her. Knew he didn’t want to. She didn’t match the picture in his mind of the woman he would love.
Yet in defiance of common sense and her own usual clear-eyed approach to life, she had managed to fall in love with him during the long, sweet, maddening weeks that she had spent side by side with him on the Sundance.
Every day she had spent on the ranch, every hour, every minute, had increased her initial attraction to Reever. She had come to deeply respect his skill and endurance and intelligence. He had taken a ruined ranch and transformed it into a land both productive and beautiful. Although she didn’t know enough about ranching to understand all the thousands of hours of sweat and determination the Sundance’s transformation had required, she did appreciate the results—fat cattle and sheep, clear streams and lakes, grass everywhere she looked, a land that was obviously cared for with an eye to the future as well as to the bottom line on a budget ledger.
She hadn’t wanted to admit that her growing love for Reever was why she was so endlessly vulnerable to his touch.
She had told herself that she thought of him as just one more coach she had to please, but she could no longer keep up that pretense. No coach had ever reduced her to tears with a few cold words. No coach had ever made her breath shorten simply by walking past her. No coach had ever set her to secretly dreaming of what it would be like to be a woman with the man she loved, to have a home and children, a chance to build a lifetime of love.
As Tory had walked back to the ranch house, she had finally understood why she hadn’t been able to save up enough money to leave the Sundance.
She didn’t want to leave.
She had seen Reever watching her when he thought she wouldn’t notice. She had seen and savored the gentleness that lay beneath his harsh exterior, a gentleness he fought against revealing to anyone, especially to her. She had seen him wanting her, and she had kept hoping that if he would only let her close, he would come to love her as she loved him.
Tory bent her head and leaned against the counter until the edge bit deeply into her palms. Silently she raged at herself.
You’re a fool, Victoria Wells. You’ve let yourself in for a world of hurt. You’ll never get close to Reever. He won’t let you. He knows just the kind of woman he wants, and you are not that woman. The only thing left to do is leave. There sure as hell isn’t any point in hanging around, waiting for the judge to explain why you were disqualified from the competition. This is just one of those times you never had a chance.
City girl. Too young. Clumsy. Useless.
Abruptly she shoved away from the counter and her unwelcome thoughts. The incautious movement made pain lance through her right knee. She bit her lip hard, cursing her clumsiness.
She shifted her weight and resumed slicing potatoes into a huge frying pan. Onions followed. She had discovered that the men loved fried potatoes and onions with everything up to and including ice cream. But that wasn’t the reason she was cooking them tonight. She had stayed out so long trying to make sense of herself and Reever and her own life that it was nearly dinnertime before she had gotten back. Hamburger steak and fried potatoes were both fast and simple.
Even so, dinner would be late. Already the hands were coming in from the range and looking hopefully toward the kitchen.
“Coffee’s ready,” she said, glancing up from the frying pan as Dutch came in. “Dinner in a few minutes.”
“Don’t hurry,” he said, looking curiously at the grass stains visible across the back of her T-shirt.
Jed came in afterward, along with three other hands. The rest were on his heels. Jed, too, saw the grass stains.
“Don’t tell me that old Twinks threw you,” he said, astonished.
“What?” she asked, turning quickly, incautiously, toward him. She braced herself on the counter before her right knee could give way beneath the twisting stress.
“The grass stains on your back,” Jed explained, picking up the coffeepot and pouring coffee for everyone. “Did you get thrown?”
She flushed and nearly dropped the spatula she was using to turn the potatoes. She hadn’t even thought that she might have stained her T-shirt rolling around on the grass with Reever.
“Yes, I guess you could say I got thrown,” she said, her voice raw.
“Hell, Tory,” said Jed, setting down the coffeepot and going quickly to the stove. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t feel bad. Everyone that rides gets thrown. Even Reever.”
“I’d like to congratulate the horse,” she said, emotion crackling in every word.
The rest of the hands laughed and chimed in, offering comfort and recounting their own experiences “riding air.”
With her back turned to the table, she blindly stirred the potatoes while Dutch finished recounting an unlikely story about Reever riding
a mare that was blind, crippled in one leg and the meanest bucker any cowhand had ever straddled. When Dutch told about the boss being unloaded into the manure pile, Tory started smiling, then laughed, shaking her head, not believing a word of it but enjoying the story just the same.
She was still smiling when she turned around with a big dish of steaming fried potatoes and onions in her hand. She hadn’t heard Reever come in, but there he was, sitting in his place at the head of the table, watching her with a dark, unreadable expression. Instinctively she flinched from him, only to have her knee protest sharply at the sudden movement. For one awful instant she knew that she was going to fall full-length across the table, scattering potatoes to every corner of the kitchen.
Dutch made a lightning grab and saved the potatoes just as Jed dropped his coffee cup and caught Tory.
“You okay?” Jed asked ignoring the coffee dripping down his shirt as he set her back on her feet. “You looked like your right leg gave way. Did you hurt it when Twinks dumped you?”
She saw only the sudden, savage look on Reever’s face as he loomed over Jed’s shoulder. Instantly she remembered Reever’s warning about leaving Jed alone.
“I’m fine,” she said, pushing away from Jed almost frantically. “Just—” Her voice broke. “Clumsy. Ask Reever. He’ll tell you how awfully clumsy I am.”
Her smile was a travesty of reassurance or humor, but it was the best she could do. She turned away too quickly to see the lines of pain that suddenly bracketed Reever’s mouth. In silence she served up the rest of the dinner, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
Normally she would have sat down to eat as soon as the food was on the table, but she couldn’t do it tonight. She couldn’t sit with Reever’s long legs not two inches away from hers and his gray eyes looking at her and remembering how she had offered herself to him so clumsily that he had been repelled. She couldn’t even pretend to push food around on her plate. She knew that she would drop her fork or her coffee cup and further disgrace herself in front of the man she loved.
“I made some cake for dessert. It’s in the pie cupboard,” she said quietly, walking out of the kitchen. “Just leave the dishes on the table when you’re finished.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Reever asked. His voice was like his face, aching with the savagery of the restraint that he had imposed on himself.
“I—I ate while I cooked.”
“Like hell. You didn’t have time. Come back here and eat, Tory,” he added almost gently. “You’re too thin as it is.”
“No, thank you,” she said politely, balancing her voice as carefully as she was balancing her body. She hurried around the corner, saying, “I’m really not hungry. Maybe later, after I pack.”
Reever ignored the sudden stir as heads turned toward him when the cowhands realized that Tory intended to leave the ranch. One look at Reever’s savage expression warned the men that anyone asking a question would probably be invited to drive her into Massacre Creek—and stay there.
Tory wasn’t sure that she had escaped until she shut her bedroom door behind her. With a shaky sigh she leaned against the heavy wood and bowed her head. To her horror tears began to well silently from her eyes.
She wiped impatiently, afraid of being caught crying. After a moment she realized that it didn’t matter. There was no father or stepfather or coach to call her a crybaby and no roommate to give her half-sympathetic, half-curious glances. In that, at least, her stay at Sundance had been a success—it had given her a privacy she had never before known.
Ignoring the tears that fell slowly, steadily, she peeled off her clothes and pulled on a knee-length green nightshirt. She wouldn’t think about Reever and the Sundance and the love that turned in her like a razor with each breath. She couldn’t do anything about those things except endure the pain.
Her knee was a different matter. It was within her power to hurt or help her knee. So she accepted her tears, adjusted the elastic support around the knee, sat on the edge of the bed, strapped weights onto her right ankle, and began the hour of tedious, repetitious exercises.
She tried not to think as she worked, but it was impossible, just as it was impossible to stop the tears from running down her face in two slow, thin streams.
After so many weeks of exercises, she had expected her knee to be much stronger than it was. Even as the doctor had been cautioning her that the healing and rebuilding process would be slow, she had believed that he was wrong. She had believed that if she just worked harder and then harder still, she would be able to achieve her goal of finding a place for herself in the world as an Olympic athlete.
She had believed that it would be the same now as it had always been in the past when she had counted on no one but herself to get what she wanted from life. With her knee as with her diving career, she would ultimately win because of her own discipline and drive, her own ability to work harder than anyone else, to give up more than others would give up, because to her the goal was worth any sacrifice.
Anything.
At least, that was how it had worked before. It had to work that way now, too. It simply had to. Nothing had changed. The only person she could lean on was herself.
Counting softly, ticking off exercises and the timed pauses between, Tory worked her knee, ignoring the pain. Eventually the knee would loosen, strengthen, and the pain would stop. Until then she would simply have to work harder.
She was softly counting aloud, timing the pause before the final exercise, when the bedroom door opened behind her. She didn’t hear it. Nor did she see Reever shut the door behind him and lean against it. His gray eyes saw first her tears, then the pale elastic support around her right knee.
“What in God’s name have you done to yourself now?” he asked roughly.
She jerked, then slowly opened her eyes. When he saw his face reflected in the dresser mirror, she knew that he wasn’t going to go away this time if she ignored him.
“Nothing new,” she said, closing her eyes again, still counting, hoping against hope that he would leave her alone. She was too vulnerable now, too shaken by the discovery that she was in love with him.
He crossed the room and knelt in front of her.
Her eyes flew open as she felt his hands on her bare leg. He ignored her startled exclamation, just as he ignored her hands futilely trying to push him away. Very gently he peeled down the elastic brace. His breath hissed in when he saw the twin surgical scars bracketing her kneecap. As softly as a sigh, his fingertips tested the slight puffiness of her knee. Then he noticed the weights strapped to her right ankle.
“What the hell are you trying to do to yourself?” Reever asked. His voice was hard, but the hands holding her knee were almost caressing.
“It’s called physical therapy,” she said, trying to pull the elastic support back into place but running into the gentle, immovable barrier of Reever’s hands. “I do it every night.”
His eyes widened. He looked at the evidence of tears on her face. “Does it hurt like this every night?”
“Depends on how clumsy I’ve been during the day,” she said curtly, not wanting to tell him that her tears had been as much from unhappiness at discovering herself in love with him as from any pain in her knee.
The lines of his face became more harsh when he heard Tory call herself clumsy, but all he said was, “Have you tried ice?”
“That comes after I finish the last exercise, which you’re making impossible.”
“I think you’ve done enough for tonight,” he said, running his thumbs very delicately over the scars.
She shivered at the caress, but the eyes that met his were unflinching. “No. There’s one more exercise I have to do.”
He looked at her, really looked, seeing the determination in her that most people overlooked because they noticed only her youth and her lovely, gentle smile. B
ut she wasn’t smiling now. Her eyes were older, unwavering.
Bleak.
He wondered what had happened to make her accept pain without complaint, how she had injured her knee in the first place, and what her life had been like before she had arrived on the Sundance and turned his world upside down.
“What happened?” he asked, pulling the brace back into place on her knee.
She wanted to laugh wildly, to release the bitterness of her discovery of a love that he would never return, but she knew she didn’t. He hadn’t asked why she was hurting now. He only wanted to know how she had hurt herself in the past.
“You should have read your cousin’s letter,” she said.
With that she stood up and braced her hands against the bedroom wall. She brought her right heel up to her buttocks and then straightened the leg, repeating the motion in rhythmic sequence. Even though she was careful, she tended to bang her knee or her foot against the wall each time she bent and straightened her leg. Instead of a wall to brace her weight, she needed a fixed, overhead bar that would allow her full freedom to move her leg.
“Here,” Reever said, picking Tory up and turning her sideways to him. He extended his long right arm across her breasts, bracing his hand against the wall. “Hold on to me.”
She gave him a startled look as she felt currents of awareness course through her from his nearness. Grimly she tore her thoughts away from what she could not have and did as he suggested, bracing herself on his arm.
It was like holding on to a sun-warmed tree branch. He didn’t move at all as she flexed her knee and swung her leg with a freedom that hadn’t been possible before.
“Better?” he asked quietly, watching her.
“Yes.” She stared straight ahead, not trusting herself to look at him without giving away everything she was feeling. “Thank you,” she added politely.
Too Hot To Handle Page 10
